Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday February 26, 2013 @03:06PM
from the they'll-be-back-...-from-the-dead dept.

AstroPhilosopher writes "In a move not far removed from the model T-101, U.S. researchers have succeeded in re-animating a dead sparrow. Duke scientists were studying male behavior aggression among sparrows. They cleverly decided to insert miniaturized robotics into an empty sparrow carcass and operate it like a puppet (abstract). It worked; they noticed wing movements were a primary sign of aggression. Fortunately the living won out this time. The experiment stopped after the real sparrows tore off the robosparrow's head. But there's always a newer model on the assembly-line. Good luck sparrows."
Bad Horse has not yet made a decision on the researchers' application.

Wouldn't the first sentence imply that nothing can be determined? I mean, it sounds like they weren't beating the shit out of robosparrow because of his wing movements but more so because he was going around looking for Sparrow Connor.

But in all serious does anyone know how they came to that conclusion given the seemingly arbitrary constant aggression?

It certainly looks like a pair of conflicting statements...did they never consider that they'd triggered an "Uncanny Valley" reaction in the sparrows and they were being aggressive towards the cyborg-zombie sparrow?

Exactly, I was about to say the same thing. I mean was the Robosparrow attacked because the others thought it looked weird because it had a dead look or something?
Is there a full paper that explains their research. That conclusion jump left me wondering!

It certainly looks like a pair of conflicting statements...did they never consider that they'd triggered an "Uncanny Valley" reaction in the sparrows and they were being aggressive towards the cyborg-zombie sparrow?

That was my reaction. The attack seemed disproportionally aggressive. Killing the competition isn't a normal reaction. It seems more like fear than aggression. Curious if that could end up being another intelligence test whether animals also deal with a form of Uncanny Valley reaction. It's not universal since I've seen animals being fairly accepting of robotic animals. Gorillas don't normally have an aggressive reaction to people in gorilla suits, Rick Baker's crew dealt with that first hand on Graystoke by mixing with wild gorillas. Birds are different and look for subtle cues so they may react more strongly to "wrong" behavior. Moving oddly might be perceived as diseased so a dangerous threat to the gene pool.

"...subjects responded more aggressively to the mount during wing waving trials than during stationary trials. A second experiment demonstrated that this effect cannot be attributed simply to increased attention to movement. Less expectedly, subjects did not alter their own display behavior in response to wing waving as compared to a static mount. We conclude that the wing wave display in the context of singing is a signal that functions in male–male aggressive communication. Questions remain, includ

> Wouldn't the first sentence imply that nothing can be> determined? I mean, it sounds like they weren't beating the> shit out of robosparrow because of his wing movements but> more so because he was going around looking for Sparrow> Connor.

That was my first thought too.

Going out on a limb here but... this is the article not the paper. My assumption would be, before going to check the paper out, that the reporter who wrote the article either misunderstood the test or possibly, his editor did, and either worded it badly, or an important statement or two got cut.....now lets do a quick check,....and the abstract says.... the reporter/editor left shit out:

As predicted, subjects responded more aggressively to the mount during wing waving trials than during stationary trials. A second experiment demonstrated that this effect cannot be attributed simply to increased attention to movement. Less expectedly, subjects did not alter their own display behavior in response to wing waving as compared to a static mount. We conclude that the wing wave display in the context of singing is a signal that functions in maleâ"male aggressive communication. Questions remain, including whether wing waving functions as a signal in the absence of singing and whether wing waving and song are redundant signals or communicate different information.

Wouldn't the first sentence imply that nothing can be determined? I mean, it sounds like they weren't beating the shit out of robosparrow because of his wing movements but more so because he was going around looking for Sparrow Connor.

But in all serious does anyone know how they came to that conclusion given the seemingly arbitrary constant aggression?

I can't quite tell if you said that in the tyrant robotic bird in a swamp sense, the Monsanto legal team sense, or the "this experiment is so awesome that I demand the researchers' bukkake all over my body" sense.

I can't quite tell if you said that in the tyrant robotic bird in a swamp sense, the Monsanto legal team sense, or the "this experiment is so awesome that I demand the researchers' bukkake all over my body" sense.

More like the "reference to a classic sci-fi movie that probably came out before you were but a twinkle in your father's eye" sense.

That zombiecatcopter [dailymail.co.uk] is out there.It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until they are dead.

Sometimes I wonder about how researchers justify generalizing their conclusions. If someone put a robot inside a human corpse to study human social behavior they'd probably observe people shooting it with shotguns and trying to light it on fire. You can't say that the arm movements triggered the aggression.

If someone put a robot inside a human corpse to study human social behavior they'd probably observe people shooting it with shotguns and trying to light it on fire. You can't say that the arm movements triggered the aggression.

Well, you could, but you'd probably be gunned down for being one of those damn zombie sympathizers...

Side Note: Boy, that gives 'bleeding heart' an all new connotation, now doesn't it?

There's video of the sparrow in the supplementary information tab on the abstract page in Quicktime format. The file 265_2013_1478_MOESM2_ESM.m4v is the one with footage of the reanimated sparrow. I'll warn you that it isn't exactly thrilling. No lurid sparrow on cybersparrow violence.

Of note is that they actually operated the mechanical bird inside a cage. I think the quote "Eventually the head fell off and the wing stopped moving" from the BBC article meant precisely that: the robobird fell apart from exposure to the elements and repeated trials.

The/. submitter appears to have wrongly inferred that this damage was from other sparrows tearing it apart, when in fact their aggressive behavior was "got close and waved menacingly."

Looking again at the BBC article, they do mention physical attacks (and the page picture seems to be depicting one), so I went looking for the researcher's' own page [duke.edu], and it turns out there are some videos [duke.edu] of sparrows attacking a taxidermied sparrow. From the looks of it, they may have used the "robosparrow" with the motorized wing in a cage, since it was fragile and they only had one. This video [youtube.com] from 2011 of a live sparrow attacking a stationary taxidermied sparrow seems to suggest that there's no way the

The literal kind [wikipedia.org], I suppose. The other kind would probably be instead termed something like resuscitation, revivification or resurrection, depending on whether the subject is a little, mostly or all dead.

Oh god, I thought they succeeded in doing some kind of Frankenstein's monster thing with electrodes and chemicals... they just stuck some wires and gizmos up the ass of a dead sparrow... big difference. Big relief imo...

Ok, you did read/see/are aware of the story in Mary Shelley's classic novel "Frankenstien: The Modern Prometheus"? And yes, I would rather see a dead body animated as a marionette rather than a brain-eating zombie or a Frankenstien's monster. Seriously, everything has to be spelled out to so many/.'rs. Maybe its a language thing...

I'm seriously disappointed in Slashdot. Not only did it take a good few minutes for someone to finally make a Monty Python reference, not one person has asked whether or not the Robosparrow ran/still runs Linux.

It's almost as if you've reddit all before and don't care about the articles.

That sparrow was simply incensed that puny humans would dare try to speak to him through such a crude facsimile. Ripping it's head off was the only means he had to communicate that to us in a language we could understand.

Bad summarization? Not necessarily. In the Terminator series SkyNet placed living tissue over a robot in order to infiltrate human enclaves. Similarly, researchers placed robotics in a carcass in order to fool living sparrows. Exactly the same? No, but the premise is quite similar. The analogy was drawn simply to give the reader an idea of what happened since readers may be more familiar with the Terminator films than with ornithology, robotics, and taxidermy. Also, there are several meanings of the word re

"... We wrapped a robot in a dead sparrow and decided to see if we could fool the other sparrows into interacting with our creepy, ghoulish automaton! It's *science*!"

And of course, it was COMPLETELY UNEXPECTED that the grisly abomination stapled to a tree branch triggered aggressive reactions from the other sparrows. Because every living thing JUST LOVES to be confronted with a soulless golem wrapped in the dead flesh of another of its kind. And that never causes pants-shitting terror or anything.

Is there, like, a review board or anything? Maybe that could screen some horror flicks before writing checks for this kind of bullshit? "New rule: If your study is substantially similar to the plot of any one of this library of 100 horror movies, or if it has a plausible chance of producing similar outcomes, we're not going to fund it."